


'Til the Earth Starts to Crumble and the Heavens Roll Away

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa, Epistolary, Fix-It, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 08:02:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20306137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: A collection of letters never sent.





	'Til the Earth Starts to Crumble and the Heavens Roll Away

**Author's Note:**

> Somehow I forgot what CoS does to me and banged out… a lot of this… very fast. Special shout-out to [Glauceridium Passerinum](https://glaucidiumpasserinum.tumblr.com/tagged/royedweek2019) for showing Conqueror of Shamballa a lot of love this week and making me really, really want to do the same! ;A;
> 
> Anyhoo, it's for RoyEd Week day 5, for the prompt "balance". Title is shamelessly lifted from the Fall Out boy song "Bishop's Knife Trick", which was on in the car while I was brainstorming and fits rather nicely.
> 
> I'm almost done with it (famous last words, <strike>although that's MCR</strike>)! I really wanted to get the whole first part finished, but it was not quite in the cards, because unsurprisingly this thing scaled itself up as it went along. So here's the teaser trailer, I guess? :'|
> 
> I'm using the Archive underage warning out of an abundance of caution – if you're on the fence, nothing physical actually happens, but the emotional stuff gets into a bit of a gray area. (Unless you're in a country in which the age of consent is 16, in which case everything is pretty kosher.)

_January 6, 1916_

  


_Edward—_

_I know you are not dead._

_I know what I have seen in your brother’s eyes and I know that there are forces governing and shepherding and gouging at this universe far too esoteric for you or I to manipulate or understand, and I know there are explanations other than the one that I will not believe._

_I know Alphonse is with me, for what that’s worth—a child deprived of all of his memories agrees with me. How validating._

_I won’t believe it until I see a body. I will not concede the last of my conviction until they show me a corpse with your hair and your fingerprints._

_I know you are not dead._

_I know you are not dead because you have held up the world on your shoulders for so long that it would collapse if you had vanished; the universe abhors a vacuum, and you would leave a void like none that anyone has ever seen—one that physics would not sustain. The balance of the constellations would not _let_ you die._

_I believed it, when they found Maes. It sunk in me and settled, and I knew that it was true; I knew that it was possible, and that it was real. I felt it._

_But you…_

_I have not yet been able to make myself accept it. It just won’t fit. And perhaps I sound like a child holding his hands over his eyes and saying that he can’t see the monsters; perhaps it’s all self-serving, but Ed—_

_I know you aren’t dead. I know you can’t be. I _know_ it, like some sort of premonition. I have never believed in any of those sorts of things. You always have brought out the strangest compulsions in me._

_The life I have now is uninterrupted cold and white. It’s better than I deserve. But it acts like a microcosm of the way the world is without you. You took the color when you left. You took the light. You took the heat._

_I should have died on Bradley’s doorstep. I don’t mean that self-deprecatingly: I mean it as a scientific, clinical fact. It is statistically illogical that I lived. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be able to hold a pen and think of words and spell them out for you._

_I have been wondering for the duration of this page if you would laugh at me for doing this, but there is a part of me… there is a part that remembers how gentle you could be when you saw someone sincerely hurting._

_You will see how I sign my letters._

_I should be dead. You should not, and cannot, and are not._

_But that is precisely what I’m afraid of, and I dare to imagine that you’d follow this—that you might have thought of it already, by now; long before I gave up stars and shoulder bars and everything we fought so hard together for._

_I am so afraid, Edward, that you are dead whether I feel it or not, because you are the equivalent exchange. I am so afraid that the world took a long look at the mistakes that I have built like bricks into a castle of wrongdoing, with its bloody moat and its towering walls, and it has finally, finally struck you down to make amends for everything that I destroyed._

_But that can’t be right. It can’t; you cannot _let_ it, and so you have to live, you have to be somewhere, you have to have thumbed your nose at fate one final time and then vanished into the ether as a parting shot._

_Especially as it is unspeakably self-aggrandizing of me—you would be the first to tell me so—to think that you could ever be reduced to just a variable within an equation I’ve been writing into history. You are not a factor. You make your own luck. You build your own castles. Huge castles! Better than any stupid castle I could ever make!_

_You would take issue with the equation metaphor too, wouldn’t you? Or at least the lengths to which I intend to stretch it._

_I just can’t sleep some nights for the thought that in some way it’s my fault._

_Of course—I know it’s my fault. I know I should have been there; I know I _could_ have, if I’d been smart enough to live up to all of the nonsense I’ve talked about myself for years; if I’d predicted people as well as I say I can and foreseen the outcomes and _found_ you._

_I could have done something._

_And you’d still be here._

_But this is what we have._

_And in a cosmic equation way, I wonder—I wonder always—if it is because of me._

_If you are one stone towards balancing the scales._

_If the lack of anything like closure is part of the punishment._

_It isn’t enough. And oh, I know how you would steam and rage at the very prospect that you’re an effect in someone else’s story, not a cause—and that much I regret. But there is so much time, and so much snow, and so much silence, and I wonder…_

_Edward, please don’t be dead. Prove them all wrong. Just once more._

_For you. For me. For Alphonse._

_Please._

_Sincerely,_  
_—RM_


End file.
